We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves (25 page)

B
ACK IN 1996,
the airlines had returned my suitcase just a few days after I’d left for Christmas
vacation. Todd was still in the apartment, since he rarely rushed home for the holidays,
so he was able to ID it, take possession. “It’s the real deal,” he told me. “Your
actual suitcase. I’d know it anywhere.” He’d given the other back, which I hadn’t
anticipated happening in my absence and was distressed about.

Of course, it’s always possible that while I was hitting the tarmac in Indiana, Harlow
was sneaking into my room, as she so liked to do, and putting Madame Defarge safely
back into her powder-blue sarcophagus. “Always possible” as in “No chance in hell.”

I do feel terrible about that. I’m sure she was an expensive and irreplaceable antique.
I’d meant to put a note inside the suitcase before it was returned, making my apologies.
Let me do so here:

Dear jogging puppeteer,

Although I didn’t steal Madame Defarge myself, she did disappear while under my care.
I’m so sorry. I’m sure you valued her highly.

The only consolation I can offer is my belief that she’s now living the life of ceaseless
retribution for which she is so justly famous. She has, in short, returned to form
as a political activist and dispenser of rough justice.

I still hope to get her home to you someday, intact in all her parts. I look for her
on eBay at least once every month.

My sincerest apologies,
Rosemary Cooke

My own bulging suitcase had no such missing items. There was my blue sweater, there
were my bedroom slippers, my pajamas, my underwear; there were our mother’s journals,
not as sprightly as when last seen—travel had frayed their corners, disheveled their
covers, left the Christmas ribbon at a rakish angle. Everything a bit squashed, but
essentially unharmed.

I didn’t open the journals immediately. I was tired from the trip home and scraped
raw from all the talking and thinking of Fern I’d done over the last weeks. I decided
to put them away for a bit on the top shelf of my closet, pushed back so I wouldn’t
see them every time I slid the mirrored doors apart.

And then, having made that decision, I flipped open the cover on the top one.

There was a Polaroid of me, taken in the hospital in the early hours of my life. I’m
red as a berry, shiny from the pickling of the womb, and squinting at the world through
suspicious, slitted eyes. My hands are fists up by my face. I look ready to rumble.
Under my picture, there is a poem.

dear, dear,

what a fat, happy face it has

this peony!

I went ahead and opened the cover of the second notebook. Fern also has a picture
and a poem, or at least part of a poem. The photo was taken the first day she arrived
at the farmhouse. She’s almost three months old and wrapped like seaweed around someone’s
arm. It must be our mother’s; I recognize the large, green weave of the shirt from
other pictures.

The hair on Fern’s head, including her side whiskers, is up. It springs from her bare
face in an aggrieved and agitated halo. Her arms are twigs, her forehead creased,
her eyes huge and startled.

A Mien to move a Queen—

Half Child—Half Heroine—

Mom’s notebooks are not scientific journals. Although they do include a graph or two,
some numbers and some measurements, they’re not the dispassionate, careful observations
from the field that I expected.

They appeared to be our baby books.

I
’VE TOLD YOU
the middle of my story now. I’ve told you the end of the beginning and I’ve told you
the beginning of the end. As luck would have it, there is considerable overlap between
the only two parts that remain.

Last fall, Mom and I spent many weeks looking through her journals together, preparing
them for publication. In her late sixties now, Mom’s taken to wearing overalls—“I
haven’t seen my waist since Aught One,” she likes to say, but she’s actually gotten
skinnier as she’s aged, ropier arms, bonier legs. She’s still an attractive woman,
but now you can see the skull beneath the face. These old photos reminded me of how
happy she’d always looked back before we broke her.

“You were the prettiest baby anyone ever saw,” she told me. The Polaroid provides
no evidence of this. “Perfect ten on the Apgar.” Six hours of labor, according to
her journal. Weighing in at 7 pounds, 2 ounces. 19 inches tall. Quite a decent catch.

I was five months old when I first learned to sit up. There’s a photo of me sitting,
back straight as a knitting needle. Fern is leaning against me, her arms around my
middle. She appears to be either just starting or just finishing a yawn.

At five months, Fern was already crawling on her knuckles and her little clenched
feet. “She used to lose track of the floor,” Mom said. “Her hands were fine. She could
see them and where they ought to go. But she’d wave her feet around behind her, trying
to find the ground up in the air or out to the side or anywhere else but down. It
was just so cute.”

I started to walk when I was ten months old. At ten months, Fern could make it all
the way downstairs by herself, swinging on the railings. “You were very early with
all your benchmarks, compared to other children,” Mom said consolingly. “I think maybe
Fern pushed you a little.”

At ten months, I weighed 14 pounds, 7 ounces. I had four teeth, two on the top, two
on the bottom. Fern weighed 10 pounds, 2 ounces. Mom’s charts show both of us small
for our age.

My first word was
bye-bye
. I signed it at eleven months, said it at thirteen. Fern’s first sign was
cup
. She was ten months old.

•   •   •

I
WAS BORN
in a hospital in Bloomington, an unremarkable delivery. Fern was born in Africa, where,
barely a month later, her mother was killed and sold as food.

Mom said:

We’d been talking about raising a chimpanzee for several years. All very theoretical.
I’d always said I wouldn’t have a chimp taken from its mother. I’d always said it
had to be a chimp with nowhere else to go. I kind of thought that would be the end
of that. I got pregnant with you and we stopped talking about it.

And then we heard about Fern. Some friends of some friends bought her from poachers
at a market in Cameroon, because they hoped we’d want her. They said she was all but
dead at the time, just as limp as a rag, and filthy, streaked with diarrhea and covered
in fleas. They didn’t expect her to live, but they couldn’t bear to walk away and
leave her.

And if she did make it, then she’d have proved herself one tough little nut. Resilient.
Adaptable. Perfect for us.

She was still in quarantine when you were born. We couldn’t take any chances on her
bringing something into the house. So for one month, you were my only baby. You were
such a happy little soul. And easy—you hardly ever cried. But I was having second
thoughts. I’d forgotten how tiring it all was, the sleepless nights, the endless nursing.
I would have said no to the study then, but what would happen to Fern? And every time
I hesitated, I was promised all this help. A village. Of grad students.

It was a blustery day when Fern finally blew into town. So tiny and terrified. The
wind slammed the door behind her and she just jumped from the arms of the guy who’d
brought her over to me. That was that.

She used to grip me so tightly that the only way I could put her down was to pry her
loose, one digit at a time. For two years, I had bruises from her fingers and toes
all over my body. But that’s how it works in the wild—the baby chimp clings to its
mother for the whole of the first two years.

Her grip was so strong that this one time just after she arrived, I’d put her down
and her little hands were flailing about in protest when they found each other by
accident. They clamped together like clamshells. She couldn’t get them apart. She
started screaming and your father had to go in and unlock her hands for her.

For the first week, she mostly slept. She had a cradle, but I could put her into it
only if she was already asleep. She’d curl up on my lap with her head on my arm, and
yawn so I could see all the way down her throat, which would make me yawn, too. And
then the light would slowly go out of her eyes. The lids would come down, flutter
for a bit, then close.

She was listless and uninterested in things. Whenever I saw that she was awake, I’d
talk to her, but she hardly seemed to notice. I worried that she wasn’t healthy, after
all. Or not very bright. Or so traumatized that she’d never recover.

Still, that was the week she took hold of my heart. She was so little and so alone
in the world. So frightened and sad. And so much like a baby. So much like you, only
with a lot of suffering added.

I told your dad I didn’t see how the two of you could be compared when your world
had been so gentle and hers so cruel. But there was no turning back by then. I was
deeply in love with you both.

I’d read everything I could about the other home-raised chimps, especially the book
by Catherine Hayes about Viki, and I thought it would work out. At the end of her
book, Catherine says they plan to keep Viki with them always. She says that people
keep asking if Viki might someday turn on them, and then she opens the morning newspaper
and reads about some kid who’s murdered his parents in their beds. We all take our
chances, she said.

Of course, Viki died before she reached full size; they were never put to the test.
But we’d thought that, too, your father and I, we truly did, that Fern would be with
us forever. Your part of the study would end when you went off to school, but we’d
keep working with Fern. Eventually you’d go to college, you and Lowell both, and she’d
stay home with us. That’s what I thought I was agreeing to.

A few years ago I found something on the Web that Viki’s father had said. He was complaining
about the way Viki is always held up as an example of a failed language experiment.
Doomed to failure, because they tried to teach her to speak orally, which, of course,
a chimp is physiologically incapable of doing. As we now know.

But Mr. Hayes said that the significant, the critical finding of their study, the
finding everyone was choosing to ignore, was this: that language was the
only
way in which Viki differed much from a normal human child.

•   •   •

“
W
HERE YOU SUCCEED
will never matter so much as where you fail,” I said.

“Good Lord,” Mom answered. “How debilitating. If I believed that, I’d just end my
meal right here, right now with a chaser of hemlock.”

We’d had this conversation one night when we were lingering at the table, finishing
our wine. It had been a special dinner to celebrate the sale of our book. The advance
had exceeded our expectations (though not met our needs). Candlelight bobbed and weaved
in the drafty kitchen and we were using that part of the good china that had survived
the Fern years. Mom seemed calm and not too sad.

She said, “I remember reading somewhere about some scientist who thought we could
miniaturize chimps to control them, the way we’ve done with dachshunds and poodles.”

I did not say that I’d read about Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, who in the 1920s made several
attempts to create a human-chimp hybrid, the elusive humanzee. He’d inseminated chimps
with human sperm, though his first thought had been to go the other way—human mothers,
chimp sperm. These are the dreams that make us human, Mother. Pass that hemlock over
to me when you’re done with it.

•   •   •

M
OM SAID:

When Fern woke up, she woke up. Spun like a pinwheel. Burst like a sunburst. Swung
through our house like a miniature Colossus. You remember how Dad used to call her
our Mighty Whirlitzer? All the noise and color and excitement of Mardi Gras, and right
in our very own home.

When you got just a little older, you and she were quite the team. She’d open the
cupboards and you’d pull out every pot, every pan. She could work the childproof locks
in a heartbeat, but she didn’t have your stick-to-itiveness. Remember how obsessed
she was with shoelaces? We were always tripping over our feet because Fern had untied
our shoelaces without us noticing.

She’d climb up in the closets and pull the coats from the hangers, drop them down
to you below. Fetch coins from my purse for you to suck on. Open the drawers and hand
you the pins and the needles, the scissors and the knives.

•   •   •

“
D
ID YOU WORRY
about me and what the impact might be?” I asked. I poured myself another glass of
wine to fortify me, since I couldn’t think of an answer I was going to want to hear
sober.

“Of course I did,” she said. “I worried about that all the time. But you adored Fern.
You were a happy, happy child.”

“Was I? I don’t remember.”

“Absolutely. I worried about what being Fern’s sister would do to you, but I wanted
it for you, too.” The candlelight was casting shadow puppets in the kitchen. The wine
was red. Mom took another sip and turned her softly sagging face away from mine. “I
wanted you to have an extraordinary life,” she said.

•   •   •

M
OM DUG OUT
a video one of the grad students had made. There were a lot of these, which is why
we still have an old VHS player long after the rest of you dumped yours. The opening
shot is a long track up the farmhouse stairs. The sound track is from
Jaws
. My bedroom door swings open and there’s a scream.

Shift to Fern and me. We’re lounging side by side in my beanbag chair. Our postures
are identical, our arms crooked behind our necks, our heads cupped in our hands. Our
knees are bent, one leg crossing over the other so one foot is on the ground, the
other in the air. A picture of complacent accomplishment.

The room about us has been trashed. We are Romans sitting amid the ruin of Carthage;
Merry and Pippin in Isengard. Newspapers have been shredded, clothing and toys scattered,
food discarded and stepped on. A peanut butter sandwich has been ground into the bedspread,
the curtains bedazzled with Magic Markers. Around our contented little figures, grad
students clean up the mess. On the screen, pages fall from the calendar as they work.

Someday, we’ll be able to embed that video in a book. For this one, we used the photos
from the baby books and tried to turn the lists of firsts—first steps, first teeth,
first words, etc.—into something more like a story. We’re using a picture of Fern
in one of Grandma Donna’s hats. Another, in which she’s holding an apple to her mouth
with her feet. Another, where she’s looking at her teeth in the mirror.

In each notebook, there was a set of facial close-ups—mood studies. We’ve paired them
so that the embodiment of emotions in child and chimp can be contrasted. Here is me
playful, all my teeth showing, and here is Fern, lip pulled over her top teeth. When
I cry, my face clenches. My forehead is wrinkled, my mouth open wide; tears streak
my cheeks. In Fern’s crying picture, her mouth is also open, but she’s thrown her
head back, closed her eyes. Her face is dry.

I can’t see much difference in the picture of me happy and the picture whose label
says
EXCITED
. It’s easier with Fern. Her lips are opened in the first, funneled in the second.
Her happy forehead is smooth; her excited one deeply creased.

Fern snuck into most of my pictures. Here I’m in Grandma Fredericka’s arms and Fern
is down below, clutching her leg. Here I sit in a toddler’s swing and Fern is dangling
from the crossbar above me. Here we lean against our terrier, Tamara Press, all the
small animals of the farmhouse in one concatenated row. Both of us have our hands
plunged into Tamara’s fur, gripping it in our fists. She gazes mildly at the camera
as if we were not hurting her with all the love in our hearts.

Here we are hiking with Dad at Lemon Lake. I’m strapped into a BabyBjörn, my back
against his chest, my face squished by the straps. Fern is in a backpack. She peeks
over his shoulder, all wild hair and eyes.

The poetry in our baby books was written in our mother’s hand, but the poets were
Dad’s two favorites, Kobayashi Issa and Emily Dickinson. When I first read these in
the journals, back in my college bedroom in the winter of ’97, it occurred to me that,
for all his rigorous rejection of anthropomorphism, he could hardly have picked two
who score more highly on Lowell’s test of kinship. Bonus points for bugs.

I
SSA

Look, don’t kill that fly!

It is making a prayer to you

By rubbing its hands and feet.

D
ICKINSON

Bee! I’m expecting you!

Was saying Yesterday

To Somebody you know

That you were due—

The Frogs got Home last Week—

Are settled, and at work—

Birds, mostly back—

The Clover warm and thick—

You’ll get my Letter by

The seventeenth; Reply

Or better, be with me—

Yours, Fly.

•   •   •

2012.

Year of the Water Dragon.

An election year in the U.S., as if you needed to be reminded, the vituperative tunes
of the Ayn Rand Marching Band bleating from the airwaves.

And on the global level—Dämmerung of the Dinosaurs. Final Act: Revenge on the upstart
mammals. Here is the scene where they cook us in our own stupidity. If stupid were
fuel, we would never run out. Meanwhile, religious bullies at home and abroad are,
in the short time remaining before the world ends, busily stomping out all hope of
even ephemeral happiness.